Chernobyl anniversary: mourners remember the dead at candlelight church services

Ukranians have started to mark the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster with candlelight church services.

Black-clad Orthodox priests sang solemn hymns, churchgoers lit thin wax candles and a bell tolled 25 times as the nation began marking the anniversary of the worst nuclear accident in history.

Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill led a service near a monument to firefighters and clean up workers who died soon after the accident from acute radiation poisoning.

"The world had not known a catastrophe in peaceful times that could be compared to what happened in Chernobyl," he said at the service, which was attended by Ukraine's Prime Minister Mykola Azarov and other officials.

"It's hard to say how this catastrophe would have ended if it hadn't been for the people, including those whose names we have just remembered in prayer," he said in an emotional tribute to the workers sent to the Chernobyl plant immediately after one of its reactors exploded.

The service began shortly after midnight, the same time as the blast on April 26, 1986, that spewed a cloud of radioactive fallout over much of Europe and forced hundreds of thousands from their homes in the most heavily hit areas in Ukraine, Belarus and western Russia.

Several hundred Ukrainians, mostly widows of plant workers, came to the nighttime service to pay their respects to their loved ones and colleagues. Teary-eyed, they lit candles, stood in silence and crossed themselves to the sound of Orthodox chants.

"Our lives turned around 360 degrees," said Larisa Demchenko, 64. She and her husband both worked at the plant, and he died nine years ago from cancer linked to Chernobyl radiation.

"This was a wonderful town, a wonderful job, wonderful people. It was our youth. Then it all collapsed," she said. "If only you knew how much our hearts ache for our children, how many sick grandchildren there are, how many couples without kids."

The disaster did not become public knowledge for several days, because Soviet officials released no information until 72 hours after the accident.

The explosion released about 400 times more radiation than the US atomic bomb dropped over Hiroshima. Hundreds of thousands became ill and forests and farmland surrounding the plant still remain contaminated. The UN's World Health Organization said at a conference in the Ukraine capital Kiev last week that among the 600,000 people most heavily exposed to the radiation, 4,000 more cancer deaths than average are expected to be eventually found.